Angie has kindly sent the materials she used for her 85 min. demo/job interview last week. If you remember, the whole lesson was a comprehensible input lesson but was focused on the seasons, so she couldn’t get tagged by any traditional teachers on the interview team who might claim that she wasn’t working with thematic units, a move I thought brilliant.
I have talked to John Piazza recently about the need to altogether avoid the term TPRS ever in an interview, or even the term comprehensible input since many people would immediately label the person being interviewed as over-the-edge with Krashen (yes, many people see that as extreme in our profession).
Rather, what we have from Michele and Angie so far, with a report from Greg on the way on his 49 min. demo this past week, are ways to pull off a good CI based demo without divulging the fact that everything done in the class is all Krashen based.
Some day this kind of stealth instruction won’t be necessary any more, but such are the times we are in, when teachers who view things they don’t trust or don’t yet understand, wonderful ways to reach kids in the target language, as threats.
Here is Angie’s lesson and thank you Angie, because I think many people will be able to riff off what you have shared with us here to make their own demo process go nice and smooth.
Just one more comment – I can’t even imagine what some traditional teachers may have done in the competition for the job that you won. 85 minutes of a demo done in the old way? I’d bet that some of the people observing that lesson had their cell phones out under the desks with the kids, or just went straight into nap mode.
Here is what Angie did, explained in the first link here, along with links to other documents she used:
Angie 85 min. Demo Seasons Lesson Plan